Sunday, January 8, 2017

The Right Has Learned to Love Trolling

But provoking a response shouldn’t matter more than speaking the truth.

But provoking a response shouldn’t matter more than speaking the truth. On New Year’s Eve, our president-elect unleashed a tweet in honor of the coming year: “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!”

His most ardent followers thrill to this display of full-on juvenile testosterone. They thrill at what they approvingly call “trolling” by the “madman.” They tweet pictures of Pepe the Frog jubilantly, figuratively slapping each other on the back over the audacity of their Big Man on Campus.

This is the “new conservatism”: Elicit a reaction. There’s no follow-up. There’s no design. And truth is unimportant. The new “conservatism” promoted by Trump and his most ardent imitators is a teenage slapfight with no general purpose other than to deliberately offend, thereby making yourself appear more powerful. Remember when Trump said that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in JFK’s murder? That was trolling. And when Cruz responded, Trump’s followers laughed, called Trump a “madman,” and suggested that Cruz was a weakling for letting such things get under his skin.

Trolling is a win-win: If the target responds, you simply point and laugh and suggest that you’ve “triggered” him. If the target doesn’t, you taunt him incessantly as a “coward.”

How does this make the country better? It doesn’t. The logic seems to be:

1. Say something vile, untrue, or insanely stupid.
2. Get a rise out of your opponent.
3. ?????
4. Make America Great Again.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with offending the Left if you’re simply speaking the truth and the Left gets offended. What’s so hilarious about the images of college students being “triggered” is the sight of grown adults “literally shaking” when they hear basic truths such as “men are not women” and “merit has nothing to do with race.” That’s actually not trolling, because speaking basic truths that elicit a ridiculous response does not mean that the purpose of such speech is to elicit that ridiculous response. The ridiculous response is just an allergic reaction to truth by those on the far left.